Cross River taps Arbitrum for loan tokenization ahead of 2027 rollout
Cross River Bank has teamed up with Offchain to tokenize loans on Arbitrum One, with a launch planned for early 2027.
- Cross River plans to tokenize loans at origination, with Arbitrum One supporting tokenization and servicing.
- Offchain’s Enterprise Services team will build the infrastructure, with ZeroDev providing embedded customer wallets.
- The companies have completed a proof of concept and are working toward production deployment.
- Cross River will remain the regulated lender, retaining its underwriting, risk management and compliance standards.
Cross River’s Nov. 3 announcement describes a platform that would allow loans to be funded, held, and transferred onchain from creation. Founder and CEO Gilles Gade announced the partnership at Hong Kong Fintech Week, according to the bank’s accompanying X post.
On stage at @HongKongFintech, our CEO and Founder @GillesGade announced our partnership with @Offchain to integrate tokenization directly into our lending platform, enabling assets to be tokenized at origination.
— Cross River Bank (@crossriverbank) November 3, 2026
The solution combines regulated origination and native… pic.twitter.com/zo8uJbFF2J
Arbitrum said its network would provide the infrastructure for tokenizing and servicing loans at launch. The project remains under development, as indicated in the graphic accompanying its announcement.
Cross River builds tokenization into loan origination
In its description of the project, Offchain said the work integrates tokenization directly into Cross River’s existing lending platform. Its Enterprise Services team is combining dedicated engineering support with Arbitrum One and ZeroDev’s wallet infrastructure.
Offchain co-founder Ed Felten offered more detail in a separate post, saying engineers would work closely with the bank to build a proprietary tokenization engine. He identified Arbitrum as the settlement network and ZeroDev as the wallet infrastructure provider.
Cross River is building with @Offchain Enterprise Services
— Ed Felten (@EdFelten) November 3, 2026
Very excited to support their business as one of the biggest banking as a service companies out there.
Our team will be working very closely with theirs for the build out of a proprietary tokenization engine, all with… https://t.co/zDyEbOh9LX
Arbitrum’s announcement places easier loan transfers and new financing opportunities among the possibilities the platform could support. It describes programmable lending as groundwork for those services, without presenting them as products already available to customers.
The companies have completed a proof of concept demonstrating loan tokenization. Their next stated milestone is production deployment in early 2027.
Embedded wallets sit behind existing borrower services
For borrowers, Cross River said applications, funding and repayments would continue through the customer interfaces they already use. ZeroDev’s embedded wallets would operate underneath those services.
Gade described the design principle as “Tokenization belongs at origination.” The bank said a shared record could carry ownership, funding, payment, and servicing activity through a loan’s life, reducing the need to move records between separate systems when assets change hands.
Cross River’s existing lending documentation shows how its platform currently handles the steps surrounding origination. Marketplace lending partners submit application information for preapproval, then send loan details into Arix, the bank’s proprietary origination software.
The documented platform supports consumer and business borrowers, secured and unsecured loans, and both term loans and revolving credit lines. Required documents include loan agreements and credit reports.
Before funding, the bank’s MPLLifeCycle system checks loan information against predefined compliance rules. Applications that fail those checks require correction or manual review before proceeding.
Cross River retains its regulated lending role
Within the planned tokenization service, Cross River will remain the regulated bank and lender of record. Its announcement says underwriting, risk management and compliance standards will continue to apply to originated assets.
The bank identifies continuous forward-flow purchase programs, flexible commitment sizes and new ways of packaging loans for credit investors as potential funding models. It names onchain funds and international investors among the capital sources the infrastructure could help reach.
Cross River has been developing blockchain services elsewhere in its banking platform. As crypto.news previously reported, an Oct. 15 agreement would connect RLUSD transfers with its existing payments infrastructure.
Under that arrangement, fintech customers would access Ripple’s stablecoin alongside ACH, wire transfers and real-time payments through a single API connection. Cross River said the integration would support dollar conversions, cross-border payments and settlement outside standard banking hours.
Arbitrum’s institutional tools include confidential computation
Elsewhere on Arbitrum, Fhenix announced an Oct. 21 production release of its CoFHE infrastructure for encrypted smart contract computation on Ethereum and Arbitrum.
Fhenix says the system lets applications process sensitive information while protecting balances, positions and trading strategies. Its design performs encrypted computation offchain before returning results to smart contracts on the supported networks.
Tokenized credit has been appearing in established lending markets, too. Morpho’s Oct. 28 dashboard recorded RWA market deposits of $2.145 billion and outstanding loans of $894.18 million.
In separate research examining borrower positions on Oct. 1, Sentora identified PRIME, a token tied to home-equity lending, as Morpho’s largest RWA collateral holding at $270 million. The ten largest positions accounted for 78% of PRIME collateral in that dataset.